The Amondawa are one of several sub-groups of the Uru-Eu-Uaw-Uaw, the indiginous people of Brazil still living in partial isolation in state of Rondônia. Reasearchers under Sinha, professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth, spent eight weeks with the tribe researching their language.

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” Prof Sinha told the BBC. “Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events. What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

”For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn’t mean that the Amondawa are ‘people outside time’, but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time”

The Amondawa language contains no word for ‘time’, or for concepts like ‘next week’ or ‘last year’. They also do not appear to use ‘mapping’ between concepts of time and space. Most languages use spacial metaphors for time so that events may be ‘ahead’ or have ‘passed’:

However, the lack of these linguistic concepts in their own language does not seam to hinder their aquisition when they learn other languages such as Portugese.

Sinha, et.al’s conclusions are rather more modest than the press coverage would suggest:

”What implications does this analysis hold for understanding time as a conceptual domain, and its relationship with space? We advance three linked hypotheses. First, time-based time interval systems and categories are in a fundamental way linguistically constructed, that is, they cannot be ‘thought’ without thinking them through language and for speaking (Slobin, 1996). The conceptual schematization of time-based time interval systems is not based in pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual image schemas (Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Rather, conceptual schemas such as the calendar are constituted by the use of linguistically organized, materially-anchored symbolic cognitive artefacts.

”Second, the conceptual domain of ‘Time as Such‘ is not a human cognitive universal, but a cultural and historical construction, constituted by schematized time-based time interval systems, reflection upon which is language and culture dependent.

”Third, because the cognitive domain of ‘Time as Such’ is a cultural, historical and linguistic construction, the hypothesis that it is universally constructed by metaphoric mapping from the conceptual domain of space is false. Rather, even if it is the case that space-time mappings are motivated by compelling inter-domain analogic correlation, and perhaps facilitated by neural structure, it is the cultural, historical and linguistic construction of the domain of ‗Time as Such‘ that potentiates the linguistically widespread (but notuniversal) recruitment of spatial language for .expressing temporal relations in space-time mapping constructions.”

The research does offer some support for Linguistic Relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, we’ve been here several times before with linguists and anthropologists prematurely announcing proof: Daniel Casasanto has termed such claims ‘Crying Whorf’.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis appeals to Romantic notions of national identity and the noble savage myth as much as to liberal ideals of diversity and the post-modern concept of social constructivism. If the conclusions of this research prove to be another false positive I don’t think we should be too disappointed to discover that human beings have much more in common than some would have us believe.

References

Malotki, Ekkehart (1983) Hopi time: A linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts in the Hopi Language.